Pages tagged "child exploitation material"

Full article published on Mercury

A retiree has been refused bail after police allegedly found a raft of child abuse material on his laptop and a number of fake identification documents.

Over the past 20 years, police allege Mr Seddon regularly travelled to Thailand and the Philippines, describing him as “well-connected” and a “frequent traveller to high risk ports for child exploitation”.

Police also alleged Mr Seddon recently contacted a computer company and asked them how to use the dark web.

Mr Seddon had also allegedly been using YouTube Kids and had searched for “young boy gay porn” before his arrest.

Police allege they also uncovered an “enormous amount of gay pornography” ranging from children to adults.

“Based on the pornography viewed, the accused has a preference for jail scene encounters…sexual torture,” court documents read.

Police allege Mr Seddon had befriended a woman in the Philippines with two boys aged six and eight, who he often gave gifts to and provided for. Police have documentation which shows payments to the Philippines for unknown reasons.

Australian Institute of Criminology releases report on child sex dolls

The Australian Institute of Criminology has released the report ‘Exploring the implications of child sex dolls’ by Rick Brown and Jane Shelling. The report discusses child sex dolls in relation to the sexualisation of children, as an “escalated form of engaging with child pornography”, the normalisation of child sexual abuse and the risk of grooming.

The authors acknowledge that there is very little empirical evidence on the implications of sex dolls and child sex dolls, and therefore also draw on research on child exploitation material and sex offences in considering the implications of sex doll use and ownership.

The report documents a range of potential harms associated with the production, distribution and use of child sex dolls.

It is possible that use of child sex dolls may lead to escalation in child sex offences, from viewing online child exploitation material to contact sexual offending.

It may also desensitise the user from the potential harm that child sexual assault causes, given that such dolls give no emotional feedback.

The sale of child sex dolls potentially results in the risk of children being objectified as sexual beings and of child sex becoming a commodity.

Finally, there is a risk that child-like dolls could be used to groom children for sex, in the same way that adult sex dolls have already been used.

There is no evidence that child sex dolls have a therapeutic benefit in preventing child sexual abuse.

The authors conclude:

It is ‘reasonable to assume that interaction with child sex dolls could increase the likelihood of child sexual abuse by desensitising the doll user to the physical, emotional and psychological harm caused by child sexual abuse and normalising the behaviour in the mind of the abuser’.

We have previously exposed Wish app and Amazon for selling child sex dolls, along with a range of other replica child body parts marketed for sexual use. In response to our campaign, Wish withdrew these items from sale.

A Queensland man found with 14 hours of video and over 500 images of child exploitation material has received an 18 month suspended sentence. Christopher Edward Hunt had become desensitised to violent porn and had been collecting images and videos of children being tortured and engaging in sex acts with animals.

The 31 year old lived with his parents and after police raided his house he admitted to possessing child exploitation material and sexually abusing the family's Staffordshire terrier.

There is deep distress in the community that defenceless children are used in such evil ways. But the broader culture that encourages the abuse of the children goes unaddressed. The same loathing that is directed toward child sexual abuse has not been extended to the mainstream promotion of paedophilic fantasies for profit.

Melinda Tankard Reist pointed out that this abuse of children was also driven by a culture that normalises and eroticises child sexual assault.

We’ve exposed mainstream retailers for their promotion of child sexual abuse. Bookworld was forced to withdraw hundreds of rape and incest titles, many of which portrayed the rape of girls by their fathers as erotic and desirable.

Australian sex shops sell replica vaginas for men’s use, modelled on the bodies of little girls and promoted as “fresh” and “innocent” with intact hymens. Chemist Warehouse sold the ‘Virgin Palm Pal’ men’s sex toy until we exposed them in 2015.

Major retailers sell sexualised clothing for girls, including padded bras, and advertising features children posed and styled in increasingly adultified ways, inviting us to see them as older than they really are.

Service stations around the country sell ‘barely legal’ style porn magazines featuring girls with braces and pigtails.

As Melinda Tankard Reist concludes,

We are destroying the cultural norms that once taught male adults that children’s bodies are off-limits to sexual use. We cannot fully address child sexual abuse until we reject a culture that glamorises it.

We were recently contacted by one of our supporters, author and freelance writer Jas Rawlinson, who had concerns about content she had come across online. Seek.com, which promotes itself as Australia’s no. 1 jobs, employment, career and recruitment site, was hosting ads calling for ‘male models’ with no experience required, with the promise of making up to $900 per hour. Jas did some digging, and found some disturbing content and information.

It was August last year when I first came across a ‘models wanted’ advert, offering extreme amounts of money to teen boys/young men for – you guessed it – no required experience.

Jumping onto the advertiser’s website (let’s call them ‘SS’), I noticed there was – unsurprisingly- a real lack of information about who their company were and what they offered. Likewise, their social media also showed little information, with barely any engagement or followers – so I decided to do a reverse Google image search of the teen boys featured on their page.

In barely any time at all, I was lead to another social media account with the exact same images – only this time, the young boys were advertised with terms such as ‘youthful’, ‘fresh faced’, ‘milky skin’ and ‘twink’ (a gay slang word that refers to slender, underdeveloped young men with ‘little to no body hair’).

Digging further online, I discovered that not only was the ABN of ‘SS’ also connected to gay pornographic services, but that the images used on Facebook were censored versions of the real photographs – which featured older men performing sexual services on the young men.

When the ad popped up again this month, I was told by SEEK’s Customer Service Fraud and Compliance Analyst, Sarah Grigg, to contact the ACCC instead. Only when I mentioned that the police had been notified – along with the Office of the eSafety Commissioner and organisations such as Childwise – did they then change their tune – eventually, removing the ad.

However, the fight to prevent ads of this nature being uploaded continues, as I again found the ad listed only a few days later (after reporting it again, the ad was swiftly removed). SEEK have vowed to try to do more to prevent this business from getting around their systems in the future, but it has to be said – why did they allow a gay pornographic service to falsely advertise to teenage boys in the first place?

There are millions of online sites where people can seek, or sell, sexual services. Teen boys should not be being targeted on a mainstream employment website.